Alyssa McKinney, an 8th-grade student at Whitesburg Middle School
in Huntsville, Ala., decided she didn’t agree with Common Core’s standardized testing.
So she opted out. The first two days of testing, she was given in-school
suspensions. On the third day, however, she received an out-of-school
suspension.

An Alabama Department of Education Facebook post stated that parents
can submit an opt-out request to school administrators in writing, but nobody
knows is Alyssa’s mom did so prior to the 14-year-old refusing to take the
test, Fox
News reports.

According to corestandards.org, the Common Core has been instituted in
44 states, Washington, D.C. and four territories. Virginia, Alaska, Texas, Minnesota,
Nebraska, Indiana and Puerto Rico do not adopt the standards. The idea of the
Common Core is that it will put students across the U.S. and its territories on
the same academic grade level, so that if you transferred from a school in
California to one in Missouri, you would be on track. It also revamps education
standards and forces teachers to incorporate different things across subjects,
like math, history, English language and science, to reinforce what students
are learning. And students are also tested on what they learn.

What do you think of this news
and of Common Core? What questions do you have—we’ll do our best to answer them
in an upcoming GL School post.